Mailer Often Brilliant In Intriguing `Ghost'

October 06, 1991|By OWEN McNALLY;Courant Staff Writer

Harlot's Ghost By Norman Mailer, Random House, $30, 1,310 pp.

Like the great literary heavyweight that he is, Norman Mailer has gotten up off the canvas after the critical thrashing he took for his "Ancient Evenings" -- one of the most ponderous pieces of fiction in 1983 -- and bounced back in championship form in his novel "Harlot's Ghost." It is a gargantuan, uneven but often brilliant and compelling saga of the CIA during the iciest of the Cold War years from 1955 to 1963.

Before you launch into this epic -- one stocked with historical figures, including a priapic President John F. Kennedy and a fascinating menagerie of Mailer characters -- find a comfortable way to hold this weighty tome so that it won't strain your back and biceps.

Keep a pot of coffee boiling on the stove so that, with a little help from caffeine, you can weather the long, tediously self-indulgent patches that crop up intermittently among some of the best, brightest and hottest writing from Mailer since his masterwork, "The Executioner's Song." At the center of this saga, which grapples with such favorite Mailer themes as sex, fear, treachery, machismo, murder and Machiavellian morality, is our hero, Herrick "Harry" Hubbard.

Harry is a privileged young man who graduated from St. Matthew's, a posh prep school, and Yale University before becoming an acolyte in the CIA in its holy war against communism.

After apprenticeships in Uruguay and Berlin, Harry winds up in the thick of things, among plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Anti-Castro measures escalate from unsuccessful, poisonous attacks on the communist leader's beard to the Bay of Pigs debacle, that abortive invasion of Cuba that shook the Kennedy administration out of its cozy Camelot mood.

Thanks to Mailer's keen eye, "Harlot's Ghost" brings a sharp, new edge to the now overly familiar litany of early 1960s heroes, villains and conspiracy theories.

Not surprisingly, we get more speculation about the circumstances of the death of Marilyn Monroe and her affairs with JFK and his younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy.

Through Harry's eyes we also get a different perspective on the

links between powerful Chicago hoodlum Sam Giancana, Frank Sinatra and JFK, and the young president's assignations in the White House with mobster moll Judith Campbell Exner. Exner was Giancana's girlfriend and allegedly his go-between with the president as the CIA was enlisting the Mafia to knock off Castro.

Exner is represented by the beautiful Modene Murphy, a fictional embodiment of Exner tinged with elements of Monroe.

Along with much high-flown philosophical speculation on everything from the metaphysics of machismo to the necessity of duplicity, Mailer gives us spicy views of history as tabloid journalism. He even shows us amusing Kraft-Ebbing-like scenarios on everything from an S&M bar in Berlin to a charismatic drag-queen and hermaphrodite described as a "surgical bombshell." Young Harry is second-generation CIA, the son of Cal Hubbard, a swashbuckling cloak-and-dagger hero and shaker-and-doer in the Company, as the CIA is called.

Harry's Old Man is a blustery, imposing character, a father-figure to measure oneself against.

But the father figure of all father figures is Hugh Montague, the CIA's mysterious master spy. Hugh is a genius and devout Cold Warrior, based loosely on the real-life character James Jesus Angleton, once the CIA's chief of counterintelligence.

Hugh, whose CIA code name is Harlot, is not only Harry's godfather but also his mentor, surrogate father and protector within the monolithic world of the CIA. Hugh initially teaches young Harry about courage and manhood by taking him rock climbing.

Rock climbing is portrayed as a physical and metaphysical means of self-discovery, a direct route to overcoming sweaty, smelly primal fear. Rock climbing for Mailer is what bullfighting was for Ernest Hemingway -- a stylistic triumph over fear and a sure-footed sign of grace under pressure. Mailer thrives on such moronic, macho claptrap.

Mailer, who has long struggled uneasily with his spiritual father-and-son relationship with Papa Hemingway -- American literature's grand master of machismo -- plays heavily on the Oedipal relationship between Harry and his flesh-and-blood Dad and, more dramatically, with Hugh, his super surrogate Dad.

Hugh is one of the most fascinating characters in the book. He's a true believer in the CIA, a defender of Western Christian values for whom counterespionage is a transcendent, mystical experience.

Accenting the symbolic Oedipal theme, Harry is madly in love with Hugh's brainy wife, Kittredge, a Jackie Kennedy-like beauty who is a theoretician for the CIA.

Much of the book consists of love letters secretly exchanged through the years between Harry and Kittredge. This epistolary device sometimes bogs down into a sort of giant, literary dead-letter office.